Being familiar with Heather Mac Donald's work, I expected to be impressed by her new book The Diversity Delusion: How Race and Gender Pandering Corrupt the University and Undermine Our Culture. After all, I've read with admiration parts of it that have appeared over the last few years in City Journal and elsewhere. What surprises me is just how powerful a wallop all this material packs when brought together between hard covers. Having published, a few years ago, my own book (The Victims' Revolution, which Mac Donald kindly cites) about the ivory tower obsession with identity, I thought I had a pretty good idea of just how much damage this nonsense has inflicted on the academy. I was wrong: the situation is even worse than I imagined.

In my own book, I deplored the rise, over the past decades, of such unscholarly, ideologically driven fields of inquiry (to use the term loosely) as women's studies, black studies, Chicano studies, and queer studies. In examining their genesis, I focused...